Segue Into Thoughts on Hypertext

As interesting as it sounds, I’m a bit wary. Similar to how I’m wary towards what is considered "hypertext" fiction. From what I understand of hypertext, it’s a piece of writing that allows the user to choose/click on particular words/phrases. Each click/choice then initiates a different narrative or storyline or "page" of text. In this manner, no two readings are the same; the narrative changes each time the reader makes a decision to pursue a particular path.

My beef with this is… how can you separate intent from randomness? Without a clear sense of what the author is intending, if any avenue is feasible, how can we differentiate junk from quality? I have yet to come across any work of hypertext fiction that I’ve found compelling, interesting, coherent. Now, keep in mind I haven’t read all that much hypertext. But what few stories I’ve tried to experience… almost always, the story degenerated into babbling drivel that made no real sense whatsoever.

I’m curious about tomorrow evening. Will the Zaireeka album be some creative new form that blows us all away? Or will it be an amalgam of noises and sounds, occuring simultaneously… but with as much meaning as having your radio on full blast while stuck in traffic with the windows down?

A few weeks back, a writer for the New York Review of Books contacted me, as he was writing an article on hypertext narratives. Personally, I don’t feel what I do with Flash and poetry is really hypertext at all. I think it’s more a presentation – a poem trying to reveal itself through Flash. I was flattered to be mentioned alongside Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, which, as I understand it, is a very well recognized and respected name in terms of hypertext.

More than anything else in the article, even though my poem was never meant as a criticism "of the aesthetics of the hypertext narrative," I was happy Tim Parks liked my poem, even without the technological bells and whistles. The fact that he felt the poem stood on its own two legs makes me delighted – that’s all I ever wanted from any poem I’ve ever written, regardless if it wound up on the page or the screen. For my money, if he liked the poem on its own merits, I feel like I wrote a pretty damn good poem.